 Why don't we go ahead and get started, I'll ask folks to take their seats. I want to thank you all for coming today. I'm very excited about this session today on reprocessing. I do have a few housekeeping items, although this is the last day of the RIC, so perhaps many of you have already heard this a number of times, but forgive me and I'll just go through these logistics. So first I'll introduce myself, of course, I'm John McCurgan, chairing the session today. I'm the deputy division director of the Division of Engineering in the Office of Research. And it's great to welcome everybody here in the room and also those coming virtually. Thank you all for attending. I will remind you all again the QR code is available to enter Qs and As. I'd encourage folks, at least in the room, to scan that early and often it does go away for a time. And so if you want to enter questions, please scan your QR code now. For those virtually, there's a tab where you can enter your questions. Please be prepared to do that. Again, I want to thank you all for coming today and now I am going to lose that QR code, so please hopefully you've scanned it. Today's session is on advanced and cutting edge reprocessing technologies for spent nuclear fuel. Before we get started, I did want to make a shameless plug for the work that is going on in the Office of Research. Maybe we can go to the next slide. As you all, you're all very interested in reprocessing and it's certainly been an area of focus for us in the Office of Research. We have been doing a fair bit of work trying to maintain our core competencies in this area and we've got work that's going on, trying to develop a better understanding of the state of technology, and we've been working with some of the labs in areas like safeguards, chemical hazards, and consequence analysis. And so this work has been ongoing and it's important for us to keep up our staffing and maintain our knowledge in this area. I'm very pleased, let's go to the next slide, I'm very pleased with the panel that we've been able to assemble today. It's just a tremendous group of individuals. I'm honored and I thank the panel for attending. While I'm doing thank yous, I also want to thank the NRC staff that's pulled this RIC together and of course my support team off to the right here, Austin Young and Miranda Ross, I appreciate their efforts. And I also want to thank the contract staff. It's been a very smooth RIC and their efforts have been absolutely fabulous. But in our session today, we're joined and I'll just go down the list here, there are more detailed bios on the website if so if you'd like to learn more about some of the individuals that are with me today, there's some information there. But I'm first joined by Dr. Jen Schaefer, who currently serves as a program director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, or ARPA-E. And her focus at ARPA-E has been developing economic and proliferation resistant technologies to support advanced reactor deployment and manage nuclear waste and used fuel. So you can see the nexus here, the reprocessing. Next I have Ross Moore. Ross is the director of regulatory affairs for Oclo, where he leads the regulatory work for Oclo's licensing activities, which include technologies for advanced division and fuel. Next we have Ed McGinnis. Ed's the chief executive officer for Curio. And Ed also an accomplished senior U.S. government executive with 30 years of experience in the fields of national and international nuclear energy policy and technical cooperation nationally and internationally, along with global energy policy and cooperation. Our next presenter is Marianne Pupenal-Decumbre, the strategy director for Orano Recycling. Her role in Orano includes the development of new value creation models and business models for the business unit. And last but certainly not least, we have another NRC presenter, Victoria Huckabee, who currently serves as the senior project manager in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation in the division of new and renewed licensing and is actively involved in the agency's reprocessing efforts. So with that, I think we can move on to our first talk. I'm very pleased to have Jen Schaefer here. And Jen, I will turn this over to you. Thank you. Go ahead and move this. Thank you very much for the invitation, John. And I'm really happy to be here. So as John mentioned, I'm going to be talking about reprocessing efforts at the agency and on some level why we thought that this was a good time as RPE to invest in these types of technologies. And I'll say that we're really fortunate that other people, while we invest in them, we're really fortunate that other people are here to do the work on them. And so this is all really excellent. But let's see your next slide. And I'll see if I can actually advance this. This is always the trick with these. Is it the, I think it's the play button. It's the green one. Oh, there we go. Let's see. I'll see, since we are kind of having some difficulties with it advancing, maybe I'm not pointing it to the right place. He was just using it, and I've been able to get it to go. Yes, maybe we'll just ask the same slide. Or maybe you seem to have the trick. Do you want to try them? Oh, well, there we at least got some of them. We'll see how this goes for other people down the block. So basically, this is the advanced nuclear portfolio at ARPA-E. So we have four programs that we've invested in this space since basically 2018. Meitner, Gemina, Onwards, and Curie projects. And so I'm the program director for the Curie program. Bob Leduc or Robert Leduc, we all call him Bob, developed the Onwards program. So really in focusing on this, Curie was looking at how can we improve the economics and proliferation resistance of reprocessing technologies as we know them. Onwards was basically, hey, when it comes to advanced reactors, we have not actually developed a plan for their waste and how this looks. And ARPA-E is a technical agency. What are the technical challenges as we look to deploy advanced reactors and manage their waste? So that is basically what we have done as the agency here. Let's try it. Next. It's up there, maybe. So Onwards, to kind of speak through this, a couple of clicks, if you would. So basically, the goal here is to develop technologies to significantly minimize the disposal impact of waste from advanced reactors while maintaining disposal costs in the range of a buck per megawatt hour. So. Thanks. Can you? Yeah. There, OK. Are you actually, could you click through several of these? There's several little bullets here. Perfect. So basically, we're looking at a 10x reduction in waste volumes or repository footprint with no weakening of safeguard standards. We also want to improve the proliferation resistance. And this was something that was a common theme between both Onwards and CURY, the idea being that we did not want to develop technologies that had a mixed, or sorry, a pure plutonium stream. Really, when you look at the technologies that we developed historically, they were in support of the weapons program. And there is no reason necessarily that these technologies need to exist in the same way for the support of commercial nuclear energy. And this comes with increased proliferation concern if you develop such technologies. So we did not want to participate in that. And then one of the things that also exists is that basically, we needed to develop waste forms for numerous advanced reactor designs. And that's something, actually, that onwards developed head-on. So we know that what we're really trying to do is keep the production of new waste streams to have a minimum sense relative to a once-through-fuel cycle and have an established path to a robust waste form or final disposition. So now if we compare this with the CURY program, so this was to enable the commercially viable reprocessing of used nuclear fuel from current light-water reactors for deployment in advanced reactor technologies. And we wanted to focus on the advanced reactor technologies in part because this is an emerging market with really a very defined need for material that is still in a phase where we don't know precisely where we're going to get HALO for. When we look at the global metrics, we wanted to also reduce the volume of waste that was emerging from these materials or from these facilities. We wanted to maintain our disposal costs consistent with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. One of the things about CURY is that we were basically trying to develop a cent per kilowatt hour fuel cost from a potential reprocessing facility that would be competitive with other fuel costs that you might bear if you were looking at, say, for example, HALO. And that's where that cent per kilowatt hour came in. When it came to in situ process monitoring, this is a difference between CURY and onwards. We were really pushing in situ process monitoring. The idea being that if you do things in situ, this actually not provides only a materials and countancy benefit but also from a timeliness perspective, but you could also dovetail us in such a way where you are actually getting a potential cost benefit to the facility by being able to provide better operational performance of your reprocessing facility. And I can elaborate on that if folks are interested. Really what this does is frequently when we talk about safeguards and materials accountancy, you think about them as cost additions to a facility. What CURY wanted to change was make sure that the economics of materials accountancy actually was synergistic with cost. Therefore, there was a cost incentive to do it. And then, of course, we wanted to develop separations that did not produce pure plutonium streams. Something frequently that comes up are some of the factors potentially driving technical interest. And really, this buttons up with the cost. So as I said, RPE is a technical agency. How do we actually drive the cost down using technical solutions? Well, it turns out that when you look at a reprocessing facility, concrete and rebar actually drive your overall facility cost at 50%. So the degree to which you can minimize the amount of concrete and rebar that you are laying down actually has significant impact on your overall facility cost. This is one of the reasons why aqueous reprocessing facilities are so expensive. It's because actually they have what I'll call is a relatively low atom efficiency. So my background's actually as an aqueous reprocessing chemist, so this pains me significantly to say. But so it turns out that there are a lot of atoms that are not actually used for the separation, but just to hold things in solution. And at the end of it, you actually have to do things like store these atoms. You have to put them into waste, et cetera. This all adds cost to your overall facility. So that's one thing that you need to manage. So this brings us to the point of managing your overall facility volume significantly. If you look at your general CAPEX breakdown on a state-of-the-art, say, aqueous reprocessing facility, you're looking at places where you have cladding storage, fuel storage, off-cast at the tune of 20%, waste management to the tune of 30%, and then actually the heart of the separation facility itself driven at 30%. And this is a point where people will say the separation part of the facility only consumes 30%, whereas basically the other 70% is to these other functions, does the separation system actually drive cost itself? And I would say if you pick a poor separation system, this makes basically all of the other cost of the facilities concuss. So that's how separations impact the overall cost of the facility. So there were a lot of different technical options that we considered. We considered hexavalent americium, which there is actually a project that's looking at this, ways that you could improve solution loading, fluoride volatility, pyroprocessing obviously was something that we considered, as well as isotope recovery and facility design. And these were just things that we were thinking about at a high level. Many projects that ended up coming in were very supportive of some of these concepts. So, and we estimated overall that we could potentially save 7X on CAPEX and about 2X in our operational costs with proposed technologies. And I believe that that's actually come to bear. So I'll dig a little bit more into some of the aqueous technologies that we thought could have been, we could have made cost improvements on. So previously, some of you might be familiar with GNEP, or the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, where we were basically going to invest in a reprocessing facility. To the tune of ultimately, some of the estimates had it on the order of $60 billion. This is way more than what the cost of fuel emerging from fresh fuel would be when you kind of look at how the cost breakdown of this. To do this, and do this effectively, they were considering four solvent extraction processes. And so you can imagine there are lots of different ways that if you could get away down just to even one solvent extraction process, you would save the cost of your facility significantly. So we were thinking, you know, maybe a new RPE process would have, you know, be able to recover and treat these elements just in one way. You could think about when it comes to the head end of your facility. There's many unit operations, you know, could we actually do some form of process intensification such that you were doing this maybe all in one unit operation instead of several? When it came to the separation itself, and this, for example, is aqueous, we use redox reagents and we have to do extractant cleanup. If we could actually get rid of a couple of things in there, would that actually help improve the cost of such aqueous approaches? And then when it comes to waste management, basically, are there ways that we could actually compress this significantly? And those were all things that we were actively considering. And so having said all that, that basically brings us to the point of the CURY program, I'm happy to take further questions on it and I'll turn the floor over to the other panelists. Thank you. Sure. Thank you. And I'm going to probably defer, because I'm not sure how this works, having the- It's really easy. It is working now? Now it's working. It's working on the one. OK. So as John introduced, I focused primarily on the regulatory side for Oaklo, but I am going to talk about the technology and how we're implementing a useful recycling program. But I do want to thank everybody for being here today and appreciate the engagement. For those who may not be familiar with Oaklo, we are an Advanced Reactor Developer Company. We were founded in 2013. And our business model is both not just to develop advanced reactors, but also ultimately to go and own and operate them. So looking at fuel cycle costs and things like the cost of fuel are important for us, our designs do operate and utilize the fast spectrum, which allows for use of both high SA low in your terrarium as well as uranium and transuranic fuel or recycled UTRU. For development-wise, we were selected by INL for access to recovered spent nuclear fuel for our first deployment from EBR2. We also have a site use permit to construct an operator facility there as well. There we go. So what are we looking for with respect to pursuing spent fuel recycling? So what we do have access to fuel for our first deployment, interest in our technologies has ultimately accelerated a need to ensure we have both a reliable and economic fuel supply for future deployments. So ultimately, this resulted in a desire to develop an economical and vertically integrated front-end fuel source. And at the same time, we want to think responsibly about the back end of the fuel cycle. Initially, our intent is to focus on light water reactor fuel or light water reactor oxide fuel and ultimately follow that by advanced reactor metal fuel provided in source from our own reactors. So at the technology level, ultimately the process we're looking at implementing is something called electrorefining, also sometimes referred to as pyro-processing. So this is a process that separates out uranium and the transuranic elements from the shorter live nuclear waste. Those are primarily fission products. So those uranium and transuranic elements can then be refabricated into fuel for use in our fast reactor technologies. This technology is not new. The technology actually has quite a legacy and established history within the US. The process was applied to use nuclear fuel separation and developed by Argonne National Laboratory. This began back in the 1960s and has continued to mature since then. And obviously, some of the work that RPE is helping to fund is supporting a future commercialization of that. It's actually still actively used at Aida National Laboratory to process and to continue to process EBR2 used fuel. And over 35,000 fuel pins have actually been recycled there already. So some of the discussion in the previous slides talked about some of the improvements that pyro-processing and electrorefining can provide. Some additional things specifically related to the facility itself is that it can look drastically different than aqueous processing technologies. So for example, on a throughput basis, you can achieve footprints roughly a quarter the size of those aqueous processes. And you can get down to roughly about a sixth of the staff necessary to support those processes. It's also a batch process, which allows for smaller batch operations. And it removes the need for things like large-scale liquid waste streams. So one of the key items, and this has been discussed a little bit, is that electrorefining can be controlled to prevent something like a separated plutonium stream. So instead, you keep the major and minor actinides together in keeping them in one combined product. And since it's not possible to separate those isotopes into any one element, many often refer to this as something that is proliferation-resistant. In this picture, what you can see are dendrites containing both uranium and ceramic metals that have been collected through the electrorefining process. So taking a look at the collective process of something that traditional recycling for Oplath using electrorefining. And John had shown an earlier side that mirrored this flow path. But essentially, the processing and fabrication can be broken out into several major steps. So first is fuel preparation and treatment. That's where, for both oxide and metal fuel, you're taking apart the fuel assembly, removing the hardware and the guide tubes and getting to the fuel meat, so to speak. For oxide fuel, the fuel meat is then removed from the cladding container as well. So oxide fuel then goes through a specific process called electrolytic reduction, where ultimately, the process removes the oxides, the oxide ions, through a conversion process, reacting with a cathode and producing a mixture of gases that can be sent to off-gash treatment. Bulk fission product gases are collected as well, as well as sent to off-gash treatment. The remaining material that you have is a metal product that can be transferred into an electrorefining process. So the electrorefiner then separates out the purified uranium product and the codeposited transuranic products, which are contained in the used fuel. As a result of this process, the actinides are then actually dissolved in electrolyte and actually deposited into the cathodes themselves. The cathode processor is then used to separate out the electrolytic salt and the U-tru ingots into, which can then be used for fuel fabrication. The electrolytic salt can actually then be drawn down and recollected and used in both either the electrolytic reducer stays or the electrorefiner stage, which again reduces your waste stream. So as Jen already kind of alluded to, there's a lot of technology refinement that can happen. So even though it's an established process, it has yet to be brought to like, well in the U.S. it has yet to be brought to a commercial stage. So we're working closely with Argon and IDO National Laboratory and other industry partners to both industrialize and commercialize the technology through programs like the Technology Commercialization Fund, as well as numerous RPE programs. We essentially have four major projects ongoing to support that effort. Those things include things like optimizing salt processing to remove vision products, improving electroperformance and thereby improving efficiency, improving sensors for things like process control, as well as developing advanced sensor technologies that'll help ensure high fidelity material control and accounting. And then finally, demonstrating conversion of oxide fuel into metal. On the regulatory and licensing front, so Oklo recently submitted a licensing project plan back in December of 2022. The intent of that project plan was to outline a set of key engagements that we see is necessary to support pre-application. Some of those engagements actually have in fact begun and we're looking forward to continue to gauge it with the staff as we work to kind of establish efficient and effective licensing approach and strategy. So to conclude, ultimately we are engaged in pre-application activities in support of a future license application submittal. We're still refining the technology through a variety of these programs that RPE is also supporting and to support taking it from lab scale into production scale. And we're also evaluating a number of sites for potential deployment opportunities. We do recognize that there are some challenges, both on the commercialization front, which we're actively working towards as well as on the licensing front, but we do see numerous benefits, not just from supporting our use of used fuel in our technologies, but also helping establish a responsible backend to the fuel cycle. So looking forward to any questions folks may have and also plan to stick around after the presentations for anybody who wants to ask a question afterwards. Thank you. Thanks Ross. Next up is Ed. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. First of all, I want to recognize the NRC and the RIC for very thoughtfully including a session on reprocessing, which from my perspective and my company's perspective is incredibly important to realize the full potential of the US, certainly the US nuclear energy sector, if not globally. Also want to recognize the Department of Energy, ARPA-E and Jennifer for really spearheading such an important public-private partnership in the R&D space for recycling with the attributes as Jennifer mentioned. Curio is a nuclear technology innovation stack company, as we say. We are developing a suite of technologies as part of a nuclear technology ecosystem. The backbone of these technologies we're developing is our nuclear recycling technology and facility. That facility, and you see the module here, we refer to it as NewCycle. And this facility is unlike any other recycling facility, reprocessing facility on the planet. By intent, we wanted to make sure that we reflect the priorities and lessons learned, frankly, from over the years with reprocessing, we understand it's gonna be a huge challenge to penetrate the back end of the market. It's a crowded field in the advanced reactor front end, but there are a lot of reasons why it's not very crowded in the back end. But what you're looking at here is a tri-vessel modular integrated system, part of our NewCycle technology. That will be in grade. That will be one of approximately 10 modules within a compact facility, relatively speaking, by the size of a large NFL stadium. This facility will be the highest capacity processing facility in the world. In fact, this facility once operating will represent more capacity than all of the reprocessing capacity in the world today. So our suite of technologies really underpinned by and building off of, in an optimized way, nuclear recycling includes advanced reactors that we are working on, including a molten salt reactor, as well as isotope production, isotope extraction. We already have identified as many as 10 isotopes based on industry market signals and off-take indicators and agreements that we already have from various industry companies that are in ranging from the medical, industrial, and defense, and also space-based. So what is the problem? What is the challenge? And why haven't we come up with an intuitive, acceptable, and sustainable approach to dealing with the so-called waste problem? One I would humbly suggest is we have an industry as well as we have done with capacity factor for reactors, as well as we have done squeezing as much out of this turnup without new builds into Vogle for many years. We're an industry where we are a 4% fuel efficiency industry, let's just call it like it is. So after the fuels run for about five years and a reactor is pulled out, that fuel, we've only used about 4% of the energy value. There is enough energy to power the NINUSS for 150 years sitting in the 75 locations, 80 locations, or so, constituting about 86,000 metric tons and increasing every year by 2,000. We're spending over a billion dollars or nearly a billion dollars a year in court assess fees, the Judgment Fund, because we have the Department of Energy and I was part of that so I have tire tracks on my back for that has not been able to retrieve that material. So that is the challenge facing us and we believe that this issue is very much holding back the full potential of the US nuclear energy sector. You don't have to take my word for it, all you have to do is see the growing, growing recognition, whether it's Green America saying nuclear waste remains extremely unpopular, whether it's nuclear waste is the greatest challenge to the future nuclear power, according to TechCrunch, me and Carnegie endowment recognizes, as I said, that modern nuclear fleets are not being built sustainably and dealing with the back end is part of that. Another thing I would say is that we are in a different time, market-wise, societal-wise. The US nuclear sector needs to evolve and evolve quickly. It's not just the fact that if we're extracting through mining uranium and only using 4% of that and not doing full justice to that disturbance and extracting, but also think about the amount of high-level radioactive material when you do not recycle that material, how much you're leaving for the next generations to come. So we are in, we're not just entering, we are in a circular economy world now. We are in a society where there is great expectation that energy sectors, whether it's nuclear or other sectors, are good environmental stewards. Maximize the utilization of material if you have to pull out raw material through mining and minimize the waste. Recycling offers both. So our facility, it may be more than one facility, our facility, each one of the modules and the one that I showed you the first and you can see it here in this slide, that one module is intended to be a very, very high processing capacity module in a compact way. Each module is intended to process about four to 500 metric tons a year. So we will, with 10, we'll have easily 4,000 metric tons or more capacity in one plant. We will also be endeavoring to do a full commercial extraction business, full recycle, bring every, and this is part of our business model and that is to extract every isotope possible and bring it to market for societal needs. As indicated, we've already identified 10 isotopes where the market is signaling there is a need, if not a large need. We're also gonna obviously be extracting UF6 and that will be a feedstock for either LEU or HALU, the equivalent of 800 metric tons a year. This facility processing 4,000 metric tons to give you a sense, obviously with minimum math, you can see that full operation in 30 years we could process all 86, 90,000 metric tons of our used nuclear fuel in our country. And when we do a full recycle, our estimate is we'll have about 4% at most remaining of high level radioactive material requiring about 300 years for storage and disposal, not a million year standard. That opens up a lot of options, including boreholes. This is the tech corridor that we envisioned centered around that backbone that I mentioned of New Cycle, the recycling facility. We are engaged with several states already that are highly interested. Trust me, I led a number of direct disposal programs in the Department of Energy and the states are usually very, very resistant. But when we have engaged with a recycling approach it has really changed, it's been a game changer. We have enthusiastic states that are actually now seeking to incentivize us to build our facility in their state. That is happening now. We've already looked at a number of states, a number of sites including old closed mines, coal mines and others. So we're in a unique position here with very interested states where we would bring a tech corridor to the tune of about 3,000 jobs full time with this facility and then probably the equivalent same number for downstream. This is just an external shot of our facility. And what this is is to sort of emphasize the point of the advantage of a tech startup company. With a tech startup company like ours, we don't have a $20 billion investment, sunk investment where it's very difficult to pivot away from purex. We have the opportunity to do lessons and bring the best of the best. So first and foremost modular, integrated, compact, scalable. MCNA, MPCNA is key. We have explicitly built in proliferation hardened processes including no separation, no pure stream of plutonium. And also commercialization is all important as well. And so as I said, full recycle, maximize every product. And also we're looking to maximize autonomy in the system as well. I'm gonna wrap it up by just saying for a timeline, we wanna do a lot of lessons learned. And one is we're in the process, we have four national labs as partners with RPE and the Department of Energy to demonstrate our flow sheet in the next three years with actual commercial use nuclear fuel. We also are planning to build a pilot facility shortly after that, then an engineering scale facility into this decade followed by the full commercial facility by about 2032 or so. And that's where we are. We have the team together, a great innovation team, a lot of inspired work. And it's great to be here. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Ed. And next up we have Marian. You may pass the clicker. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. It's a great honor to participate at this, no? Okay. Is it better? Yeah. It's a great honor to participate at this round table and I'm very glad to see here so many people interested in reprocessing. First, I will say a few words on a Rano recycling experience. For more than 50 years, Rano set up an industrial program with appropriate process to recycle splint fuel from its electrical customer. To do this, Rano has two plant, one base in La Hague, where the fuel is stored and then reprocessed, and the other is at Melox, where we manufacture assemblies called MOX fuel from materials that has been recycled, plutonium in particular. La Hague is a very mature facility with unique World Track Freaker, nearly 40 tons reprocessed, 400 tons, 40,000 tons reprocessed, and Rano has not only recycled for France, but also for European country, such as Belgium, Germany, or Switzerland, as well as country from other continents, such as Japan. Since 1966, and thanks to innovation and R&D, the industrial scope and capacity are continuously enlarged. We can now reprocess a wide range of IWR fuel, including high burn-up, research reactor, and MOX fuel. And now, benefits of recycling are many, and let me just highlight three of them. First, the improvement of security of the fuel supply and the saving of natural uranium. 96% of the youth's fuel still contains recyclable, valuable material, and recycling consists precisely in recovering it in order to manufacture new fuel again, which will be re-loaded into a nuclear power plant. Today in France, this lead to 10% of the electricity generated being derived from plutonium. And we could do more. By recycling uranium completely and reach the equivalent of 20 to 25% of the electricity being produced coming from recycled materials. This is a real use of material based on the principle of circular economy, because MOX is indeed an energy-rich sources to give you some idea. One gram of plutonium is equivalent to one ton of oils in terms of energy production. Secondly, recycling enables to significantly reduce the volume of final waste by a factor of five. Regarding the conditioning of the waste, the vitrification process implemented in France makes it possible to untrap the waste in a safe matrix. This is very stable over a very long time, which enables to have a long-term visibility of the behavior of the waste that will be produced. The absence of uranium and plutonium at disposal simplifies the repository safety basis, because there's no criticality. Simplifies the design with reducing spacing limits, eliminates the need of IAEA safeguards. And you may also want to know that in France, the plant's repository called CGO is only designed for universal canister, vitrified and compacted canister. And finally, there is no or reduced need for interim storage beyond the spent fuel pool. We have a clear convention, most probably shared by all of you, of the great potential of nuclear to meet the challenge of the climate change. And thus, there is a real potential of development. And all this development to be sustainable will need a virtuous fuel cycle. Ensuring the preservation of natural resources and the safe and environment-contained fairly waste management. This ambition drives the next generation of recycling process, with first, the assessment of accidental around fuel. Some of the material being used in the development of this fuel could potentially affect their back-end management after graduation. For example, in terms of recycling, some may pose significant challenge for dissolution operations, which may require adaptation and development to optimize their reprocessing. Other assessment of advanced recycling process have been or are performed, among them the co-extraction of plutonium and uranium, the separation of radioisotopes from the fission product in new circular fuel in order to meet the expectation of the society or to strengthen the autonomy of critical value change, or the waste management for disposal, with, for example, specific separation that could allow transmutation of specific radioisotope, especially long-lived or more mobile isotope in the repository. But not only fuel process and technology, but also recycling scheme can be improved to provide sustainable fuel cycle solution for the development of nuclear society adapted to our customer requirements. And here, there is two examples of alternative recycling approach. The first one used mocks with a recycling approach. In 2014, the Netherlands only nuclear power plant called Borsela began operating with mocks fuel and with a two-step approach. In this approach, in the step one, uranium makes available the plutonium required for the fabrication of mocks assemblies for Borsela. The plutonium is loaned to our client under a loan reimbursement schedule. And in the step two, plutonium will be separated from the client's customer's fuel at La Hague. And this plutonium will be returned to uranium as loan reimbursement. This step is still many years off, but it will include reprocessing of Borsela final core. According to this scheme, the client will not have any plutonium left to manage when Borsela closes. The second one is based on alternative fissile material program. This program examines the potential for using alternative fissile material to produce AFM fuel for US reactor from a technical schedule and cost perspective. The use of this AFM provides not only an alternative source of fuel for the US reactor, but also the opportunity to transform excess plutonium from global store into materials that is an attractive for threat or diversion. Providing sustainable fuel cycle solution for the development of nuclear energy also means to develop and implement R&D program to adapt the fuel cycle to the long-term perspective. An advanced recycling approach are based on innovating mocks fuel technology allowing to multi-recycle plutonium in all WR reactor. Core management with innovative mocks allow for non-net plutonium creations that means that plutonium is burned in mocks fuel assembly at the same rate it is created in the uranium-based fuel assembly. Three innovative mocks concepts exist to elaborate mixed core management. You can see one of them here. A fuel concept that considers the use of U-Walk's fuel rod and mocks fuel rod into the same fuel assembly. The second one is the solution consists in keeping the current mixed fuel assembly design and using lower quantities that currently used. And the third solution use enriched uranium in the mocks fuel matrix instead of depleted uranium. A French program with CAA-DEF from Atom and Orano is running and is progressing very well and now we have two fuel variation and their final evaluation and we are preparing their in-reactor development. For the middle long-term, there will be as many different type of use nuclear fuel as advanced reactor. And the industry is engaged in a continuous innovation process in taking industrial effort in research and development to shape the future of nuclear including generation three and generation four reactor which include both large and small and modular reactor. But the backend of the fuel cycle of this reactor must be considered as early as possible in the design to icon for the potential economy, technical and regulatory challenge that it represents. A survey of the solution offered by the nuclear industry to perform this backend management was made including both existing solution and perspective for the future. When considering treatment of use nuclear fuel for reuse of valuable material, hydro metallurgy is the only technology without be implemented at an industrial level with strong recalls operation, especially at La Hague plant. However, current industrial process are not applicable to all type of fuel for advanced nuclear reactor and other technology and process must be developed to offer treatment solution for this new type of fuel either for reuse or for waste management optimization. To conclude, Horano has been doing successfully for decades. We routinely invest in innovation and are engaged in the future such as advanced reactor or development of recovery for other radioisotopes. That's the challenge that we have and most probably share by all the countries that relies on nuclear to meet the climate change challenge. Thank you for your attention. Thank you, Mary, that was fabulous. And next we have Victoria, Victoria for the NRC. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Victoria Hockabay. I'm a senior project manager in the Office of Nuclear Reactive Regulation, Division of Renewed Licenses. I'm going to discuss the existing NRC regulatory framework for reprocessing facilities. I will provide a brief overview of the NRC's experience with reprocessing facilities, discuss the existing regulatory infrastructure and the importance of pre-application engagement with the NRC for entities considering the submission of a license application for reprocessing facility. In the 1960s, the NRC permitted West Valley under 10 CFR Part 50, which operated from 1966 until 1972. Two other facilities, one in Morris, Illinois and another in Barnwell, South Carolina, were built in the 70s but never operated. The NRC staff considered the necessity of updating the regulatory framework for licensing and regulating a reprocessing facility in several circuit papers. In Secchi 11.0163, the staff discussed the resolution of previously identified regulatory gaps for licensing of reprocessing facilities in a draft regulatory basis document. In Secchi 13.0093, the staff recommended the development of a new rule that would incorporate the applicable elements from other regulations such as Part 50 and Part 70, and developing integrated and cohesive regulatory framework for reprocessing facilities. However, in Secchi 21.0026, the staff requested approval to discontinue the rulemaking activity, stating that a rulemaking was not justified and there was limited interest expressed or expected from potential applicants for reprocessing facilities. The staff also found that licensing of reprocessing facility could be adequately accomplished under the existing framework. Currently, TNC for Part 50 provides licensing framework for production and utilization facilities. In addition, licensees and the Part 50 must also comply with the requirements found in other parts of Title X of the Code of Federal Regulations, some of which are shown here on the slide. Several regulatory guides listed on the slide provide guidance on various topics applicable to reprocessing facilities. While there is no standard review plan developed specifically for reviewing a fuel reprocessing facility application, the staff would consider the applicable elements of New Reg 1520 standard review plan for fuel cycle facilities, license applications, and New Reg 1537 guidelines for preparing and reviewing applications for the licensing of non-powerful actors. Excuse me, the TNC for Part 50 licensing process requires separate reviews for construction permit and then for an operating license carried out sequentially. While certain preliminary information needed for the issues of operating licenses reviewed as a part of the construction permit review, the final design and plans for operation are developed during the construction of the plan. The application for the construction permit requires a submittal by the applicant of general information, an environmental report, and a preliminary safety analysis report. The TNC staff conducts a safety evaluation and an environmental review in parallel preparing a safety evaluation report and an environmental impact statement. The advisory committee on the active safeguards reviews the application and conducts a series of meetings with the applicant. A public hearing is conducted by the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board. Finally, a construction permit is issued. The operating license process includes the continued development of the facility design, submission of the final safety analysis report by the construction permit holder and the NRC review and inspection of the facility. The NRC staff prepares the safety evaluation report and the supplemental environmental impact statement. Similar to the construction permit process, meetings with the ACRS are held and the public receives an opportunity for a public hearing on the operating license. The process ends with the issuance of an operating license. Spent nuclear fuel reprocessing and the technologies that will support it are receiving increased attention and funding from two department of energy RPE programs, namely onwards and QE programs, which we heard about earlier today. In December 2022, OKLO submitted a licensing project plan outlining the pre-application engagements with the NRC in anticipation of submission of an application for a fuel recycling facility. In addition to OKLO, several other entities have publicly expressed interest in potentially developing and building facilities for spent nuclear fuel recycling. In accordance with the 2008 reactor policy statement, the NRC encourages early interactions with advanced reactor developers and prospective applicants. In 2018, NEI issued a draft guidance document which emphasized the value of developing a regulatory engagement plan by applicants and as a means of reaching agreement with the NRC staff regarding licensing approach, resolution of issues, schedule expectations and other topics. In 2021, the NRC staff issued a draft paper outlining the benefits of pre-application engagement for advanced reactor applicants. Pre-application interactions are not unique to advanced reactors and the NRC recognizes that such interactions may be particularly beneficial for fuel reprocessing facilities because they allow for early identification and resolution of technical and policy issues that could affect licensing. Pre-application engagement includes public presentations by prospective applicants, interested parties, licensees or companies to the NRC as well as written submittals such as the regulatory engagement plan, white papers, topical reports and other documents. Advantages of pre-application engagements for applicants include enhanced regulatory predictability, greater review efficiency because the NRC staff becomes familiar with the design, early interactions between the NRC applicant and other agencies that have a role in the environmental review could shorten the licensing review schedule. And finally, early engagement with the ACRS through the review of safety valuations of topical reports which may improve regulatory reliability and may shorten applications review timelines. Pre-application engagement would also benefit the NRC staff by allowing for greater review efficiency, early public engagement on the attributes of a design, increasing transparency and enhancing public awareness, greater NRC staff familiarity with new design approaches considered by the applicants and early engagement with the ACRS. An applicant may submit a white paper to the NRC seeking informal feedback on a number of topics including, for example, licensing approaches, proposed format and outline of an application and applicability of regulations through design. The NRC staff would assess the approaches and provide feedback to the applicant during the pre-application phase. Topical reports provide more specificity and more regulatory certainty than white papers and are used to improve the efficiency of the licensing process by allowing the NRC staff to review certain methodologies, designs and operational features prior to the submittal of the full application. Topical reports are also typically used for early identification of potential policy issues. The applicant should consider submitting topical reports on key topics for review during the pre-application phase. Topical reports should be submitted early enough to support staff issues of final safety, final staff safety evaluations prior to submittal of an application. The NRC staff would review these topical reports and prepare safety evaluations with findings that can be relied on in the application review. Additional information on submission and review of topical reports is found in NRC Office Instructions, LIC 500 or LIC 500. Thank you. Thank you, Victoria. And I, again, want to thank all the panelists. And I also thank you all for staying on time. So that was fabulous. And that really allows additional time for Q&A. And I think looking at this, we have a large number of questions. And so I thank the panelists, obviously, that very engaging conversations. Again, the QR code is up for those folks that want to enter questions and also folks at home. And what I've done here as I've been listening to the presentations and looking at the questions as I've come in, I'm going to try to select questions so that all of our panelists have the opportunity to be in the hotspot. And then also I've been kind of combining some questions sometimes where it's appropriate. And so with that, Jen, I'll put you up first. And perhaps this is an area you've heard a fair bit. Proliferation concerns certainly are an area for reprocessing. And so there are two kind of related questions. One was asking about specific studies that talked about the proliferation resistance of the technologies that RPE is looking at. And another that asked about a recent National Academy of Sciences fuel cycle report where there were apparently some findings that to the point that reprocessing technologies that don't separate out pure plutonium have some of the same proliferation and terrorism risks as the Purex process and might require the same level of MCNA. And so I wondered if you had any comments or thoughts along those lines. Sure. So let's see here. So I'll start with the second one. You might need to refresh me on the first one once we get there, right? So with respect to proliferation concerns with technologies that don't separate pure plutonium streams, it's based on some conversations that I've had with folks within the government. It's not obvious to me that it's the identical proliferation resistance, right? I think what that question suggests is that if you have a pure plutonium stream that's separated that if you commingle them there's no proliferation benefit. And I think that that is not true. That's not to say that you don't have to monitor the streams. That's not to say that you don't have to have accountancy in place. But with respect to is there potentially some proliferation benefit to keeping things commingled, I think that there is information that suggests that that has some benefit. And then with respect to your first question, sorry. Yeah, you may have already touched on that. Were there any studies that compared the two proliferation resistance from the purex approach to the new technology? To just commingled as far as specific studies. So that I have not seen as much as far as explicitly looking at that. So that's kind of the comment that I would have there. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I will offer, you know, if the other panelists feel strongly and want to chime in, please just raise your hand or grab my attention. So the next topic actually Ross is for you. There were a couple of questions about the Oclo processes. And in particular, there was one about if the products that you were going to generate were suitable for use in the Oclo reactor and specifically without removing the lanthanide fission products. And then somewhat tangentially related question was if there were other isotopes that you were going to be extracting that you plan to use or had different commercial value? Yeah, so obviously the intended use of the end product for us is the combination of the uranium and the transuranics and those are co-deposited in a relatively isolated process themselves. And so that's the intended use and that is suitable and that's been demonstrated through use in reactors like the EBR2 reactor. So we're leveraging the operating experience associated with the EBR2 facility to support our use case for our technology and our fuel development. With respect to the second question, you know, there are opportunities to take advantage of fission products that we are not specifically using for use metal fuel. And we're considering those potential opportunities. But right now we're focused on the development of a fuel form for our future reactors. Great, thank you, thank you. And again, I've been going through the questions. I'm also trying to change some topics. And so, Ed, I don't know, your presentation was I think one of the only ones that really talked about interaction with states and local governments. There's a couple of questions along those lines is how are you assessing that the states are interested and has there been interest in or outreach to tribal nations and that kind of community? I wondered if you could talk about that. Yes, indeed. The answer is yes to all of the above. We are in fairly progressed discussions and engagement including sites community engagement with at least three states. That has as part of the broader set of stakeholders included certainly Native American tribes, local communities, we find that certain states have optimized opportunities whether it's the infrastructure, whether it's the trade-based workforce, with the numbers we're talking about for our facility up to 3,000, mostly trades-based that requires us to look for opportunities in particular economies where that workforce is available. Certainly areas where there are former coal mines can be optimal. I also wanted to mention going back to the earlier question about proliferation resistance that we too extract and we are extracting as part of a three-stage process starting with a pyro process and then a fluorination process and then the third vessel, that's where we do the extraction, co-extraction or extraction with what we call our true fuel with this transuranic-based fuel and we do make every effort to make it as proliferation hardened as possible including looking at inclusion of lanthanides in other fission products and not just transuranics that we've heard earlier. So the progression is going very well with the states and the calculus, the benefit has been very clearly recognized by a number of these states and one of the keys they want to know that they're not going to have material stranded there. They want to know that they can speak to their state residents, local communities and assure them that they're doing due diligence to have a pathway other than hoping that the US government is going to eventually take the material back and what we have found that that's not enough. They want to see that there is at least a secondary option at minimum and that is through recycling to dramatically reduce the amount of high-level radioactive material that would be in their state and also to realize the full economic benefit with the workforce tax-based benefit, et cetera. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Ed. And Marion, this next one is for you and we got a couple of questions about your program which is obviously ongoing. You have a real operational experience and so there's a question I'm going to merge these two so you'll forgive me questioners if I'm merging your questions a little bit. But obviously you have a production facility and it looks like you may be experiencing kind of a backlog or a buildup of material. The Mellx plant may have had some production challenges and so there's a potential backlog there. Can you comment about that and what your strategies are for managing that or if you want to even correct the perception there about the storage? Are you experiencing excess storage? Yeah. Excuse me. I'm not very sure to really understand it. Can you be more specific, Klaus? Sure. So part of the question was about surplus. As spent fuel is generated, you have a supply and I think the question assumes that you're not reprocessing it as quickly as the inventory is coming up so there's a backlog there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The point is that normally in France when the nuclear cycle is balanced, you reprocess all the UOX fuel. You spend UOX fuel produced from a reactor but you don't reprocess Mox fuel because today our current facilities are not able to reprocess at an industrial scale Mox fuel. But and the fact is that so roughly each year you only have 100 tons of Mox fuel to manage. But the fact is that since maybe five years, we have been facing industrial issues with our Mox facility and because of this issue, we need to slow down our reprocessing facility and in order to go the material through our facility. But this is an industrial issue that we made due to a change of the uranium supply for Mox fuel. So it's very, it's basically the depleted uranium. We changed the supplier of the depleted uranium and we are facing industrial problem but we set up action plant. We changed the supply of the depleted uranium again and now the trend is improving. And thanks to, I think we expected to meet satisfactory level of production in the couple of next years. So after that, we have to treat and to reprocess all the backlog of the inventory and we expect to do that in the next few years. Oh, please. Just since we're spending a little bit of time talking about proliferation, resistance and plutonium. One thing that I'll kind of elaborate on my previous answer, these types of assessments are really tough and talking with folks. There are many variables that enter into this space and depending on how you constrain those variables or weight those variables right this all, ends up providing the framework with which you might assess the proliferation resistance. But one thing that I think reprocessing does allow you the opportunity for is it's the only technology that I'm aware of that allows you to get the plutonium back into the reactor and get it fissioned and get it transmuted and how you value and weight that with respect to other potential aspects of proliferation risk, I think varies between parties and communities but I think it's something that we probably don't talk enough about and it's something that we can continue conversation on. Great, thank you, thank you. All right, Victoria. So a couple of questions for you in the area of guidance and the gaps and so while you've got the mic maybe you could tackle both of these topics. So is the NRC preparing any guidance for the expected potential applications and in particular about using the Part 70 integrated safety analysis to demonstrate compliance. And then while you have the mic maybe you could speak to if we have any plans to address the gaps that were mentioned in that Secchi. Right, so to your first question about the guidance the NRC staff is currently considering embarking on the effort to update the guidance. We are in the process of evaluating the existing guidance and thinking about what changes we need to make to our existing guidance to bring it up to date. We recognize that many of the red guides that, in fact, I think all of the red guides that were shown in my presentation slide earlier are actually quite old and they're like 1970s vintage. So we definitely are looking at it and thinking about what guidance we're going to update and sort of in what order. No decisions have been made today as far as what we're going to work on first but certainly as the decisions are made in that space we'll discuss that and make that information publicly available. And I'm sorry, John, the second question was about the regulatory gaps I think, right? Yes. Yeah. So with regard to the regulatory gaps, we I think we really would need to think about it in the context of an application. We believe that really some of the regulatory gaps are perhaps higher priority or lower priority in the context of a specific technology and a specific application. And so this is where I think the question of pre-application engagement with the NRC is so important. We highly encourage anyone who is thinking about submitting an application to us to come and talk to us early about what the technology is and what the specific policy issues may be or regulatory issues so that we can identify them, flag them and think about what we need to do to address those regulatory gaps. We have a variety of regulatory tools and how those gaps can be addressed in some cases but that may be an exemption or perhaps we could breach that gap with updating our guidance. So maybe we need to reconsider rulemaking in the area but really I think it would be pretty difficult to answer this question generically. Again, I think understanding the specifics of an application, of a specific application and the technology would be the key. Great, thank you. Thank you, Victoria. So, Jen, I've got another question and this one's going to near and dear to my heart because I've done some work in the transportation area here at the NRC and so the question is about whether it's within the scope of ARPA's mission to think about transportation of high level waste and if you have any ideas or tactics to secure the material during transport. Right, now thank you for that. So just to kind of back up for a second as far as what is in scope versus out of scope for the agency. So there's about five areas that we have a statute over within ARPAE to take direction as program directors to look at and so I will try to remember all five of them but basically reduce emissions, increase emissions, safely and securely manage our nuclear waste and spend nuclear fuel, grid resiliency and I always forget the third one but that's kind of in the original statute but basically it's energy related. So we have really broad statute about what we take on and program directors come in, there's about 14 of us at the agency now with an idea for where if we invested say on the order of $40 million into an area of $30 to $40 million, could we move the needle on the conversation and actually enable significantly enabling technology that it would basically disrupt state of the art and the path forward and so that's what we do at the agency to the degree that transportation costs and assessment of that might be something that ARPAE takes a look at. I think what we would need to do is one assess is this a long pull in the tent that if we developed kind of a short burst significantly intense funding in this area would it actually significantly move the needle towards the deployment of nuclear energy and advanced reactors given our energy statute and energy mission. So it's the first thing that we would need to do an assessment of. Second thing that we would need to do an assessment of is okay if we view this as true then what is the technical R and D that actually is significantly enabling within this scope and so that's basically how ARPAE assesses that. I will say as a program director all people are term limited and so I'm only here for two more years so I probably will not take that on. I've been doing some things looking at nuclear heat et cetera but these are the types of assessments that one can do as a program director at the agency. Great thank you. And I don't know if Ed or Ross did you want to chime in on have you guys reached the point where you're thinking about transportation or storage or some of the other ancillary is not the right word but other considerations when you think about the total process. Definitely we've thought about it and that's part of our consideration in looking at locations. Certainly we want to have ideally the accurate distance to the largest number of sites with use nuclear fuel based on the capacity and the business line for Curio we'll our market will literally be the entire U.S. where there's use nuclear fuel whether it's on Washington California or on the East Coast obviously the East Coast has the greatest concentration or in Midwest too. So that's one factor. It's good to see the Department of Energy has done a lot of good work in the two programs for transportation and ABLIS and Fortis and that's important. And we have U.S. companies right now that on a daily basis transport use nuclear fuel and successfully much with the NNSA or national security mandate but is a very important factor one has to consider early on but we believe there is already a lot of experience and proven history on transporting safely securely. Yeah, and I can echo some of the comments from both sides. You know, transportation is something we take seriously. Wherever we say we'll need to transport that fuel both to the recycling facility as well as away from the recycling facility and there's a well-established process and mechanism for transportation of fuel as is with existing canisters that will take advantage for transport to the facility. And we're looking at ways that we can leverage technology and updated analysis to support transportation to our facilities down the line. Great, thanks Ross. Keep the mic there because the next one's coming your way. So what spent nuclear fuel is OKLO planning to process and where will its recovered material be used? If it's only planned for OKLO's reactors then how many reactors are needed to utilize the output of the recycling plant that you're envisioning to prevent accumulation of materials? Can you repeat the first part of that question? Sure, what use nuclear fuel is OKLO planning to process and where will its recovered material be utilized? Yeah, so our initial approach is to establish relationships and we've already begun conversations with several utilities to peer access to light-water reactor fuel to support our initial feedstock to our recycling facility. Our, you know, the scaling capabilities of the electrofinding process allow us to start at an appropriate capacity to support our initial deployments and scale up as we continue to grow and deploy reactors, you know, at an increased rate, at an increased rate to support numerous deployments beyond. We've never considered OKLO to be a company to deploy just a single reactor. You know, we look forward and envision a fleet of reactors and as we begin to look towards that, you know, that the ability to deploy numerous reactors beyond the initial one, we want to make sure early that we've established a reliable fuel supply. Great, thank you, thank you. So Ed, the next one, and I can't recall whether you covered this in your talk, but will Curio be supplying fuel to LWRs, for example, MOCs and or MSRs? So the answer is both as well. The, our design is versatile and it was designed to be able to handle light-water reactor, PWR, BWR, or non-light-water certain fuels, whether it's molten salt, so an uncool fast reactor. We've actually even looked and been asked by one utility to look at the feasibility study of using our new cycle technology to recycle certain tricycle fuels. I think that's a reflection of the increasing pressure by the public, certain stakeholders that we showed due diligence in perceived waste forms or use nuclear fuel, whether it's light-water or non-light-water. Again, kudos to DOE and RPE for looking at both. So our current new cycle facility, however, that we're planning to deploy first at full commercial, will focus on the light-water reactor fuel from the entire fleet, including the stranded shut-down fuel sites, so both BWR and PWR. Great, thank you, thank you. So Marian, this next one's for you. It refers specifically to slide seven, so I hope you have your slide package memorized, but it says you provided the options for recycling of advanced reactor fuels. Can you describe what some of the biggest challenges may be for recycling these fuels? This one? Is it this slide, I think? 47? Yeah? No. Well, actually, it's really dependent of the type of advanced reactor fuels that we are speaking about because some advanced reactor fuel like Oxidefoil are very close to those we currently are reprocessing in France, in Atlahag, so there is no significant challenge to reprocess them. And for all the fuel, the challenge will be to access to the nuclear material and to go through the outer structure of the fuel, and this is, for example, the type of the trisor fuel. And whereas for all the fuels, the challenge is more or less a technology-level maturity of the process. And that's the case, for example, for processing metallic fuel with electrochemical separation process. Great, thank you, thank you. So, Victoria, there are a number of questions here for you and certainly we can invite Ed and Ross to chime in, but it really has the focus of would a reprocessing facility be regulated under Part 50 and not through Part 70? So I don't know if you wanna comment on that and certainly Ed and Ross, you can chime in if you're with your thoughts on that as well. Right, so the way the staff has historically considered licensing or reprocessing facility in the way that the reprocessing facility applications have been reviewed in the past, right? The, you know, specifically the West Valley, right, was licensed under Part 50 and the other two facilities that were under construction but never operated, right? Those were also reviewed in the construction permits were issued in the Part 50. And so if we look at the sticky papers that I discussed in one of my earlier slides, those sticky papers also considered a licensing or reprocessing facility as a production facility under Part 50. So today the current regulatory framework looks at a protection facility as a Part 50 licensee. Having said that, if any of the applicants have different ideas and they would like to propose an alternate path to licensing, we would certainly be open to having this conversation. It's not something that we've really had a lot of engagement on just yet. But again, I mean, I think we're open to having a discussion and having a dialogue and looking at alternative scenarios if they're feasible and so what would be a path forward to licensing? Go ahead, Ross. Yeah, and I can just build on that a little bit. Earlier in Victoria's response to a previous question, she recognized that many of the gaps that have been identified previously recognize the technology specifically associated with recycling and how it compares against the existing framework both in Parts 50 and Parts 70, recognizing that there are certain elements of recycling facility that may be better suited for alternate regulatory frameworks. So from our perspective, we're kind of evaluating a multitude of pathways and viability for licensing approaches. Great, thanks. All right, so let's, let me move back to Jen Schaefer. And pardon me, so Jen, and maybe I didn't catch this, whether this is within your mission, but the question was whether RPE had plans to try to tackle the siting challenges of the not in my backyard kind of syndrome. I don't know if that's within your mandate or not. Yeah, no, this is, the short answer is kind of no. When I came to the agency a couple years ago, one of the things I was very attentive to was this challenge, and one thing to keep in mind is that the agency is very attentive to technology and technical solutions that could be enabling with respect to this, so I actually did, I'm not the person to lead this program, but I did do some really program development work trying to assess what are some technologies that can be enabling, what is the science that would be enabling to the point of basically if we understood the genesis, if we understood the nuances, if we understood a whole bunch of facets about nimbyism and how it impacts nuclear, not only nuclear, but actually a whole host of other energy technologies, transmission lines are notoriously horrible to sight due to some different challenges there. If we had better insight on that, would that maybe shift how we develop technologies, think about technology, deployment, et cetera, et cetera? So while that is something that I think if we had some really excellent state-of-the-art social scientists that could combine different modeling, different data techniques, et cetera, to try and inform this better and develop what could be good metrics, is that something that the agency could do maybe if there was an interested director at the time, but right now that's not something that I have my sights set on or is it something that I think will probably be tackling in the near future unless we recruit a program director in that area. So if you are interested and want to be a program director in that area, so talk to me. That would certainly be a challenging position, but there are people out there that love a challenge. So thanks, let's see, so this next one I'm gonna switch. Oh, no, wait, Jen, I'm sorry, I'm coming back to you. Oh, okay. For Curie, how are you getting the halo from recycling the LWR fuel enriched 5% now and maybe up to 8%? I'm not sure in your portfolio if you've looked at the accident-tolerant fuels and the higher-enriched fuels that are being proposed. Right, so with respect, I think in general it's kind of, if I'm interpreting it well, are we looking at accident-tolerant fuels? Are we looking at the halo challenge, kind of all those sorts of things? So to date explicitly, you could think about recycling and reprocessing as a potential feedstock for enrichment, so that's one thing that one could consider as a part of the portfolio. Really, we were looking at through the lens of reprocessing, whatever product that you might be interested in producing from that, there were some viable ones that could be there. Halo was one that we didn't call out exclusively in the FOA, but I think it's something that could be interested, and there might be some people working on that. So that's one piece of that there. The other piece of it with respect to accident-tolerant fuels is that something that RPE can look at, you know, on some level it kind of comes back to we try and be, you know, kind of very early on in the tip of the spear to kind of get the conversation rolling on something. You know, there's already been a significant amount of accident-tolerant fuel work within the office of nuclear energy, so that's potentially not a place that we would dovetail to. One place where I had considered another program development idea was, you know, once we have the material produced from the back end of a recycling facility, what does that fuel fabrication actually look like? Some people already knew, I know how to do this quite well at Toronto, et cetera, but are there actually opportunities for innovation here, especially when you look at mixed actinide uranium transuranic fuels, we could probably go back to the drawing board and leverage new technologies in this space. Is there a program director working on that? No. However, if you would like to come to the agency as a program director, this could be an opportunity for you. I didn't think this was going to be a job fair for RBE, but... We turn it into that. John? Oh, please. If I could just add as well, with the HALO consortia that the Department of Energy announced and they received a very robust response from industry, Curio is a part of that, was approved to be a part of that through our recycling technology. So that's an emphatic answer, I believe to your question that recycling can indeed be a pathway for feedstock and a pathway to HALO production. In fact, our new cycle facility with this pretty much unprecedented capacity, we would be able to produce approximately 120 metric tons equivalent of HALO a year based on a 4,000 metric ton plant. So recycling is a part of re-establishing the US domestic nuclear fuel production and I believe a number, many members of Congress are now starting to recognize that as well. And actually, thanks for saying that. I didn't know how public your declarations were on that, so I didn't want to step out of line. Thank you, thank you. And so this next question, I might hit all the panelists on this one, but it has to go with what additional technological gaps do you see? And the way the question was phrased, so Jen, I'll start with you maybe if I could. If you had more money in re-processing, are there, what technological issues would you want to try to tackle next? And maybe Ross and Ed, you can start to get your thoughts on if ARPE had more money, what would you want them to tackle next? Yeah, so this is great. One of the things that we didn't end up funding as much within the CURRI portfolio, though we did fund some, I actually thought there could be some significant innovations in aqueous re-processing, as much as I think, you know, Pyro and fluoride volatility and other separation processes have a place. There's actually a lot of reasons that aqueous works as well as it does. We just didn't see things, sometimes they could get it down the cost curve as much as we wanted to, but actually we are funding Arano to do some work too. So I mean, there's still definitely promise there. So I think that there's potentially a lot of innovation that remains in the space of aqueous to maybe get it to be more viable. And then I'll also comment on, you know, I'd mentioned kind of, if you notice anything about the agency, Rachel Slebaugh was a program director before me, she was much more reactor focused. I then came in as well as Bob Lidoo, we're looking much more at the back and fuel cycle. ARPE has a tendency with program directors maybe to take different pivots into things and pivot into different areas. So to the point of fuel fabrication, other things, transportation, right? There are other areas that we might end up seeing if we could make a big impact in that and then hopefully set a pace for other folks. So that's where I'd see. Ross, did you or Ed want to chime in? Or, and then I'll also ask Arano and Victoria if you want to comment on that. You know, I'll say on the technology barriers, you know, we're fortunate to be able to take it, many of our, you know, many of the barriers we're looking in, maybe not barriers, but opportunities to develop the existing process and to take it from, you know, what's currently, you know, implemented at a lab scale and to really bring it to a commercial scale. And that's really where we're focusing our efforts and making sure that we can extrapolate the technology that's in use today and support commercial deployment. And so that's where our focus and that's why we've established the engagement we have with the ARPE program as well as the technology commercialization fund. We also want to recognize some of the improvements we can make to things like material control and accounting, establishing things like online monitoring, you know, to improve both efficiency in the process as well as ensuring the requisite safeguards can be established and, you know, things like deviations can be addressed, you know, in a near term. So that's where obviously our focus at and that's why we've targeted those types of programs through the ARPE opportunities. And so that's, that's what we're doing. Thank you. Did you want to chime in? Yes, and Curio has now kicked off, just recently concluded the contract with ARPE and we're very pleased with our four national labs that presents us with a unique opportunity with four national labs and a partnership to really leverage some unprecedented capabilities in the labs in order to validate our flow sheet and then move up to the scaled up steps of pilot and engineering scale. So I think there is significant opportunity for additional work if ARPE is in the position and has the resources and inclined to do so. Great. And Mary, I'll allow you to revise the question to suit your purposes, but from Arano's perspective, and would you see what are the technological gaps that you see that you're still trying to tackle that Arano might be looking at with additional funds? Well, I think if we are looking about the future nuclear challenges, we may still have a gap to optimize the waste management. And in Arano, we've got a project to evaluate how promising could be a molten salt reactor in transmutation and conversion of minor actinide and plutonium. And I think that we can go faster in this project because it's a service that could really be complementary to recycling option and that could deal with plutonium, minor actinide, and all the waste optimization. And that's very important and that's a key for the public acceptance of nuclear development. Great, thank you. Victoria, anything would you want to chime in on that at all? Right, so as a regulator, we're currently thinking about looking at our regulatory framework and kind of trying to think about the question of how do we make changes, what changes are necessary, first of all, and how do we make changes to make sure that we build or update our regulatory framework to be as robust as possible, but also technology friendly, if you will, technology diverse, technology neutral, perhaps is the better qualifier here, so that we could be in a good position to license any type of facility that an applicant would present before us and evaluate it and consider the safety aspects of a variety of approaches, whether it be back with electrochemical or any other technology that may be brought to us. Great, thank you. And again, let me thank all of our panelists today. We are a little over time and I thank you all for your attendance both here in the room and virtually. Again, I really appreciate the panel's reprocessing is seeing a lot more attention now and I'm very grateful for you all attending our session today. And with that, I will thank you all and we will close the session. I'll mention again that the panelists, I think they're all amenable to having further conversations so you can feel free to maybe grab a cup of coffee and chat further, but thank you all.